Woman of Stone

 "They come to punish..."

Mark Gatiss' annual Ghost Stories for Christmas are, it seems, quite firmly an annual fixture now, something which pleases me very much. This year we have an adaptation of E. Nesbit's Man-Size in Marble; it seems that, aside from her more well-known children's stories such as The Railway Children and Five Children and It, she was also wont to write the odd ghost story for her fellow adults.

Delightfully, the episode is book-ended by two rather witty little metatextual sequences with Celia Imrie as E. Nisbit herself, on her deathbed, telling the story to her doctor ad cheerfully chain-smoking as the lung cancer goes through the final stages of killing her- in themselves these scenres are at once a grim memento mori and a cheerful reminder that the only response to mortality is to live life to the full.

And yet this tale isdark. A newleywed couple, newly married, and all sorts of subtle indications of domestic abuse- the physical kind, yes, but also the cotrolling behaviour that lies behind it. And, with this being the 1880s, poor Laura has no recourse to justice, hope, or even dvorce. Awfil though it is, perhaps her end is a mercy of sorts.

And, of course, the ghostly (if very, very solid) force from the deep dark past echoes all this, the violent jealousy of me who, of course, apply that tired old double standard as they unthinkingly abuse their wives.

I saw the twist coming, yes, but it worked nevertheless. Capital punishment may be barbarous, Jack may be innocent of the specific crime for which he hangs... but I have no sympathy for him.

There is not, it has to be said, much to find scary in this episode. But it was excellent nonetheless.